Monday, August 13, 2012

His murder of a Los Angeles Police Officer was chronicled in book and film

SACRAMENTO -- The
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) announced today that
inmate Gregory U. Powell, whose murder of a Los Angeles police officer was
chronicled in the 1973 best-selling book "The Onion Field" and a
movie of the same name, died August 12, 2012, of natural causes in the
California Medical Facility in Vacaville.

Powell, 79, committed
to CDCR on November 14, 1963 from Los Angeles County, was serving a life
sentence for the 1963 kidnapping of two Los Angeles Police Department officers,
one of whom he murdered. Powell and his partner, Jimmy Lee Smith, had been pulled
over by the two plain-clothes officers on March 9, 1963, for making an illegal
U-turn. The two armed men disarmed the officers and drove them to an onion
field near Bakersfield.

Powell fatally shot
Officer Ian Campbell, but Officer Karl Hettinger managed to escape to a
farmhouse about four miles away.

Powell was arrested
the night of the murder, and Smith, the following day.

Powell and Smith
were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but appeals and a retrial
stretched on for more than a decade. Their death sentences were commuted to
life imprisonment after California's death penalty was ruled unconstitutional
in 1972.

Smith was paroled
in 1982, but he frequently was returned to prison on drug-related parole
violations before dying of an apparent heart attack in a county jail in 2007
after being picked up for yet another parole violation.

Powell, like Smith,
had been scheduled for release in 1982, but an outpouring of public opposition,
including a 31,500-signature petition, led the parole board to rescind his
release. He continued to come up for parole, but was denied each time – the 11th
and last time on January 27, 2010. He was considered for compassionate release,
which he opposed and the Board of Parole Hearings denied, on October 18, 2011.